Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The
Theory of Everything, the 2014 British biographical
romantic drama film directed by James Marsh
is in news – it was based on - My
Life with Stephen by Jane Wilde Hawking, which deals with her relationship with
her ex-husband, theoretical physicist Stephen
Hawking. The hero donning the
role of Stephen won the best actor Oscar this time. I had posted on that and on Amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease and Charcot
disease, is a specificdisorder that involves the death of neurons. Hawking is afflicted by rare early-onset
slow-progressing form of ALS that has
gradually paralysed him over the decades.
He had experienced increasing clumsiness during his final year at
Oxford, including a fall on some stairs and difficulties when rowing. The problems worsened, and his speech became
slightly slurred; - yet with all
drawbacks, he has achieved great things ! Stephen Hawking
has warned that artificial intelligence has the potential to be the downfall of
mankind. 'Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,'
he said writing in the Independent. 'Unfortunately, it might also be the last'

I have been making
frequent references to the Rajnikant starrer, Shankar directed blockbuster ‘Enthiran’ - Dr Vaseegaran, a scientist
working on alternative intelligence develops a humanoid robot
which gets rejected by sinister designs.
At one point of time, the robot ‘Chitti’ asks why he has not been
provided with ‘emotion’. Dr Vaseegaran
reprogrammes it with human feelings and emotions so that it could distinguish between right and wrong. However
things go wrong when Chitti falls in love with Sana ( Aishwarya). Towards the
climax, the robot replicates itself multiple times and lengthy fight
ensues. In one of the songs hailing robot, comes
reference to ‘Isaac Asimov’

Isaac Asimov was
born in Petrovichi near Klimovichi, then Gomel Governorate in the Russian
Soviet Federative Socialist Republic – he rose to become professor of
biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction
and for his popular science books. Asimov was prolific and wrote or edited more
than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Asimov is widely
considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A.
Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his
lifetime. The Galactic Empire
novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as
the Foundation series.

Like Enthiran, the possibility or rather the apprehension of robots
dominating human World is often discussed and a project is launched to ensure
‘artifiicial intelligence’ would only follow rules and make ethical decisions. Researchers at the Universities of Sheffield,
Liverpool and the West of England, Bristol will address concerns around
artificially intelligent robots – their £1.4 million project will run until 2018. Project aims to ensure robots meet industrial
standards and are created responsibly, allaying fears that humans may not be
able to control them.

In Dec 2014 was
this interesting report in MailOnline which is excerpted here : Stephen Hawking
and Elon Musk are among the eminent scientists who fear that intelligent robots
could be mankind’s downfall. Only
recently, Professor Hawking warned that 'artificial intelligence could spell
the end of the human race,' and a team of British researchers are embarking on
a collaborative project to ensure that the autonomous robots we build in the
future will make decisions that are ethical and can follow rules.

Robots
that can think and act without human intervention are fast moving from fiction
to reality. There are fears that intelligent robots could one day overthrow
humans. The nuclear, aerospace, manufacturing and
agricultural industries are starting to develop autonomous systems that can
carry out tasks that are either too difficult or too dangerous for humans,
while driverless cars are already with us. Researchers at the Universities of
Sheffield, Liverpool and the West of England, Bristol have set up a new project
to address concerns around these new technologies, with the aim of ensuring robots meet industrial standards and
are developed responsibly.

Professor Michael
Fisher, principal investigator at Liverpool, said the project will ‘develop
formal verification techniques for tackling questions of safety, ethics,
legality and reliability across a range of autonomous systems.’ Google has set
up an ethics board to oversee its work in artificial intelligence. The search giant has recently bought several
robotics companies, along with Deep Mind, a British firm creating software that
tries to help computers think like humans. Among all forms of technology that
could wipe out the human species, they single out artificial intelligence, or
AI, as the 'number 1 risk for this century.'

The
three ‘laws of robotics’ were devised by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov in a short
story he wrote in 1942, called ‘Runaround’.
It is stated that a robot may not injure a human being or, through
inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders
given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the
First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does
not conflict with the First or Second Law.

As part of the new
research project, the University of Liverpool will focus on the development of
‘verification tools’ that will provide mathematical proof about the decisions
the intelligent systems will make, allowing experts to check up on future
machines’ actions.